My kids made some mini-zines about Element Ranger who has to go through variously-themed line mazes & proto-platformer levels. They dug them up again as we go into stay-at-home mode, I remembered Seiklus, we played it, they love it.
Surprised myself with how much I remember from when I last played it in a library computer lab.
how’s performance now? surface tension ran like shit when i played in summer
I’ve played the hell out of HL2 (mostly on the Xbox/360), but I still haven’t gotten more than maybe half an hour into the first game, if that. Which I only have done in the past… I don’t know. Time is weird. Might be two years; might be ten. Recent, anyway.
Would it be too cute to say that it’s jazz to Hotline’s synthwave? Yeah. Probably.
Dunno quite what you mean here. It’s definitely rendered in 3d on a technical level, but mechanically it’s essentially a 2d game.
I have an RTX 2070 and my fps tanked at multiple points in some of the outdoor scenes, even after throttling down the resolution.
Decided to try out Tales of Phantasia (the PS1 version) for about an hour tonight after a friend’s recommendation. It’s absolutely dripping with production value. Everybody probably already knows that the sprites and tile sets are gorgeous and full of detail, but it’s even better in motion. There are some awesome animation flourishes all over the place, whether it be the way you run through puddles of water, or how satisfying it feels to step onto a save point mid-dungeon. Or this juggling clown NPC which, by the way, has its own background music that fades in and out as you walk towards it.
I dunno, I feel like even if you don’t give a shit about the story in this game because it’s too anime or whatever, the opening hour’s presentation is so slick that it will make you want to progress to the next area to see what other one-off things they packed in there. No wonder the Super Famicom original was on the biggest cart.
It also has a hell of a banger of an opening theme.
Combat can be a little weird because if an attack causes your character to move forward or whatever, finishing the move causes the character to walk back to its initial position (but it’s inconsistent? maybe it’s just single hits and not combos? I dunno haven’t figured it out yet) I heard somewhere there’s an item a couple hours in that lets you shut that off, and there’s another item you can buy that lets you use Street Fighter motions in combat to pull off moves instead?
I dunno, I’m real excited to play more of this…
This was even in the original SNES version!
Even more charming there IMO
i’ve been playing super mario 64 while sick and it’s somehow able to grab my attention away from being sick yet doesn’t overwhelm me, maybe cuz i’m basking in the nostalgia or something, or maybe because i find a lot of stars you get to be rather simple. it’s mostly just “explore this huge area and see what you find”. i’ve got 75 stars and plan to get all 120, and by plan to i mean i will prolly get like 90 or something and then stop. also, i’m playing a hack where mario is replaced with isabelle, which is v important.
Beat Yakuza 3, in the same way that I “beat” 0, Kiwami, and Kiwami 2 - crossing the finish line after nearly 50 hours, only to find out I got shy of 50% completion.
It was…OK? The stuff with the kids and the small time gang in Okinawa was honestly more engaging than just about everything in Kamurocho. The final villains were pretty bland, and a considerable step down from Nishikiyama, Goda, and (look I know it came way later but!) the whole crew of Zero foes.
The ending would have been a hell of a cliffhanger for Yakuza 4 if the post credits cutscene didn’t show that everything went back to normal.
Gonna do the murder mystery side quest in Premium Adventure mode and then probably call it. Not super interested in getting better at all the minigames, dating all the hostesses, fighting in the arena, etc. etc.
Then, uh, onto 4!
Oh shit also - uhhhh where should I hook up my PS3 and play Dead Souls in all of this?
bloodpotioned this before reading “hack that replaces mario with isabelle” and now i wish i could give two bloodpotions
did more final fight streetwise on stream. the game was fine, until i got to those end bosses, who are all complete bullshit. and despite my best efforts, i could not defeat the final boss: demon drug addict cody.
Dead Souls is set after 4.
They are saying it is non canon now which is BS.
And oh lord no do not try to 100% a Yak game it would be misery and easily 200 hours a piece.
That’s some Jared Leto action, right there.
Oh yeah I’m not nearly enough of a masochist to do everything in these games.
Someday I’ll go back and finish the cabaret club storyline in Zero. Forgive me, Yuki 
if only this was the olden days of sb where everyone had a main account and then a second account that was a parody of another poster
Make sure you get to the top before 120 stars. Took me like 20 minutes but felt great.
Done with Grandia 2. It’s not bad overall, but felt like a huge slog in the last hours. So many times I thought the final boss was right around the corner only to find there’s still another entire dungeon, or a boss rush or whatever.
They definitely dialed up the anime to 11 since the first game. Most of Ryudo’s dialogue was the kind of edgy stuff all the late 90s anime dubs had.
The HD version is kinda messed up on Switch, if you play in handheld mode a lot of the battles are in slow motion. I mostly played on the train so it was extra infuriating. Also the japanese voice acting was often out of sync with the timing of the auto dialogue boxes, resulting in dialogue getting cut off and characters seeming to talk with the wrong voice. Kinda spoiled a few key scenes.
The sound is really weird in this game. Obviously there’s the weird walking noises but pretty much all the SFX felt like they had a really limited library of 1 second looping sounds and just used the closest approximation. So you end up with zombies that make a crackling ice noise or caterpillars that sound like a flock of seagulls. Rivers sound like a running tap noise cutting off and cycling every second.
Also playing through Doom 2. I think I can see why people say it is inferior to the first game. The level design just has a lot of big rooms filled with like 15 of the same monster and a lot of frustrating to-ing and fro-ing trying to work out where to go. Setting it on Earth also makes it look more drab and a bit nonsensical. Still, Doom is Doom so it’s still fun times
Got around to playing New Doom this morning and it’s pretty good. That’s all I’ve got to say!
That game was wild as hell, thanks for streaming it
I’m currently scaling the “Argent Energy Tower” and it sucking fricks.
Verticality is this game’s biggest weakness. I’m playing on Ultra-Violence and I’ve died more to platforming mistakes than to demons. It’s often unclear whether I’m supposed to attempt a jump, and I don’t trust Doomguy’s fickle magnet-hands to grab onto ledges. Stop trying to make Half-Life a thing! It’s not working! It didn’t work in Half-Life either! Point and click games shouldn’t have platforming segments where you die if you fail to platform!
On top of that (hehe), the gunplay lost its exhilaration after I realized around the one hour mark that every combat encounter is meant to resolve itself. Oh, little zombie mooks that exist to refill your health bar? Thanks. Coulda saved me the trouble of pressing F by just putting a health pack there instead. Oh, a required encounter in a locked-down area with a single giant enemy? Good thing I have this chainsaw to just erase that enemy! Thanks for refilling all of my ammo! I mean, I didn’t really need it, but thanks!
I really liked the foundry level, because it’s been the most Doom-like level by far, with lots of winding passages and corridors and keys. It just felt like a chore because the level objective was to complete four static combat encounters. The level would have been way more engaging to me if it was just a labyrinth filled with a bunch of enemies. Most of the game feels like a corridor anyway, so why not just make it a “get to the end” level? In the original Doom games, I always knew my objective was to find the exit to the maze, and all of the enemies were simply there to impede my progress. Sometimes there were necessary combat encounters, especially in Doom 2, or in the case of end-chapter bosses, but it was generally more exciting for me to run past enemies and avoid combat until they became absolutely overwhelming. That’s not really an option in New Doom; the game just kind of expects you to beat up everything.
Also, the health bar might as well not exist. Instances of damage range from 50 to 100, at least on Ultra-Violence. Game coulda had a “three hits” system, or whatever. What’s the point of having separate suit upgrades for health and armor? They’re both pickups, they’re both “health”, the green one happens to be less common. And despite my instinct to pick up all of the pretty green shinies I see, it never really seems to make a difference. The only time I die in combat is when I accidentally let a big swingin’ giant dude out of sight, and he creeps up and whacks me right behind the head in one go! Every other enemy just really sucks at hitting me, and they get staggered too easily. Yup, this game feels mechanically designed around enemies that should absorb way more hits than they currently do. I say this because adding more enemies wouldn’t increase the difficulty. AOE weapons are abundant and powerful, and once I weaken an entire group of enemies with an explosion, I can just go melee-happy and press F to pay multiple respects in a row.
Man, to hell with this game. keeps playing
EDIT: Oh cool, it crashed in the background while I was writing this.
